Social media signals and their roles in Google rankings

[anitawapa]

Hello,

I keep on hearing that social media signals have a role in the way Google ranks pages and sites, but for now, I haven't seen any hard evidence of that.

Like any other company, we have pages on facebook, linkedin, google plus and twitter, to which we post daily. No, there are no clients coming in from social media, so I was wondering if it's worth investing time in adding every day updates, unless those count in ranking on Google.

What do you think, is there a link between social media and Google rankings, and how much does this weight in ranking my sites?

Thank you

[Vijay-Gaur]

Hi Adriana,

I am not sure whether you have already this blog post on moz https://moz.com/blog/relationship-between-organic-rankings-and-social-shares

This would give you fair idea about what actually you should be doing for SEO using social media signals. I find that people fancy these technical terms too much, you just need to follow the right approach to reach out to your target audience and a strategy to engage them. This would eventually get you traffic and ranks both. You should also read mine and other comments on the post.

I hope this helps if you have further questions, please feel free to ask.

Regards,

Vijay

[BlueCorona]

Hello! I have a definite answer for you, straight from Google.

Right now, Google doesn't feel 100% secure about integrating social media into the search results, because there isn't that much oversight into what's "good," or "bad" on social. For example, Google can control the search results based on various ranking factors. They don't have that currently for social media posts. They have been allowing Tweets into the search rankings, which could be a signal of what's to come in the next few years. We just wrote an article about it here: https://www.bluecorona.com/blog/smx-east-social-seo-correlations 

That being said, there is a definite correlation between quality, trusted websites and social media. As Matt Cutts said, good content gets shared, and social media is a sharing platform.

As far as your social media efforts, you should be using them to reach out to potential clients or customers, creating a fan base, and building your overall industry authority. We know it's hard to  measure and get frustrated about success, but try using engagement as your measurement. The more qualified people are engaged with you, the more likely it is they'll talk about you and remember you.

[julie-getonthemap]

I believe social influences SEO, but even if it doesn't right this minute, will it?

Do you anticipate changes to the way people search for businesses like yours?

I believe that Facebook is working on grabbing some search share from Google. As that happens, that social investment will pay off even if it's not paying off now.  Already I can use Facebook to search for something like Hotels in NYC and get true personalized results - I'll see the names of my friends who like those pages. Knowing my friends, it will let me know which hotel is swanky, which one is cheap, depending on which of my friends liked it.